Five Australian women who were strip-searched and invasively examined at Doha airport have won the right to sue Qatar Airways after an appeal.
The women were ordered off a flight and checked for whether they had given birth after a baby was found abandoned in an airport bin in 2020 - an incident that sparked global outrage.
An Australian judge last year found the state-owned airline could not be prosecuted under the laws governing global travel, and said the proposition its staff could have intervened was "fanciful, trifling, implausible, improbable, [and] tenuous".
The women appealed, with the full bench of the Federal Court finding the primary judge erred in throwing out the case.
The five women filed a lawsuit in 2021, against Qatar Airways, Qatar's Civil Aviation Authority and the operators of Hamad International Airport, a firm called Matar.
